February. So, time to apply for Google Summer of Code.
This year the projects are smaller in scope, about half, which I think will suit us. We’ve had big features in the past (JSONField being the latest merged) but I think a big project can be overwhelming. A smaller feature, or a cluster of tickets in an area, should be easier to manage, and mentor. We’ll see.
After the great success of the project last year on the django-stubs mypy plugin, I was keen to open it out again. Nikita has said he’d been keen for another project on django-stubs, and I’m also hoping that both the Wagtail community and the Jazzband org will be able to come on board.
GSoC is such a good project, it would be nice if we can spread the benefits throughout the Django ecosystem. It’s no more effort to apply including others than just for ourselves so… The goal would be to spread the net ever wider — why not a GSoC on any of the major packages in the Django ecosystem> — but slowly, slowly, as always. We’ll see how this year goes.
Speaking of slowly, I finally got around to merging the DEP to add an accessibility team to Django.
This was driven by Tom Carrick and Thibaud Colas, who form the basis of the new team, and is an effort to make sure that to the extent possible Django powered sites can be accessible by default. This is great work, I want to thank Tom and Thibaud for taking the initiative.
A note on sustainability here: the a11y team needs members: do you have disabilities that make using the web and/or web development more difficult, or relevant expertise in the field? Can you help with the odd bit of input on a PR or discussion? If so, we’d love to hear from you. Come say hello on the forum.